Portable storage devices such as flash drives and portable hard disks give modern people great convenience in information transmission and storage. Take a flash drive as an example, it provides many advantages, such as smaller size, lighter weight, hot plugging and the like. It usually has a plastic or metallic casing and a USB connector extended from the casing. The USB connector is magnetic and can be attracted to a magnetic material.
With constant growing capacity of the portable storage devices a single such a device can store a great amount of information. In the event that the stored information needs to be thoroughly destroyed, deleting them via a computer operating system cannot meet special confidential requirement as there are many methods available now to restore deleted files. In view of such concern, a lot of methods have been developed and introduced aiming to thoroughly destroy data on storage devices. They generally can be divided into mechanical destroying or non-mechanical destroying. The non-mechanical destroying approach, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,852,590, exposes a storage device in a high intensity magnetic field of microwave energy to thoroughly eliminate information stored in the storage device. The mechanical destroying approach, such as U.S. publication No. 2010/0294865, butts a storage device via a press arm onto the surface of a grinding wheel that spins at high speed. The storage device is ground to small granules by the emery disk so that it cannot be assembled again. Another type of mechanical destroying approach is disclosed in U.S. publication No. 2011/0252934 which holds a storage device via a clamp equipment and slices the storage device via a cutting equipment into a number of smaller pieces to thoroughly destroy the storage device.
All the aforesaid conventional techniques aim to destroy portable hard disks with larger size, but are not applicable to destroy the flash drives with smaller size. Moreover, their structures are complex and expensive, and cannot perform destroying operation in a large scale. There are still rooms for improvement.